Cultivating Intercultural Communicative Awareness In Senior High School Students

With the development of modern science and technology, the world has become a global village and people from different countries and nations communicate with each other more and more frequently. Now, China has been in WTO for several years and is playing a even more important part in the whole world. Meantime, with the coming of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, we Chinese are encountering and contacting with foreign people more often, even for common people. Thus intercultural encounter has become a fact of daily life in China. But in contact with the foreign guests, though we can communicate with them in the foreign language, we often find it difficult or impossible to make the communication go smoothly and sometimes there will even be misunderstandings due to the different cultural awareness. Increasing intercultural contact has highlighted the necessity for enhanced effective intercultural communication, and it has become a most important task for an English teacher to help students develop intercultural communicative competence.Senior high students are at their best in learning and their mind is quite active and plastic. While according to the survey, they are lacking in intercultural communicative knowledge, so it is quite necessary to cultivate their intercultural communicative awareness.In the 2003 New English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools issued by the Ministry of Education in China, the cultural awareness is clearly stated and required. Though different provinces adopt different sets of textbooks, they all lay emphasis on cultural and intercultural knowledge introduction and intercultural awareness cultivation.In this thesis, after the literature review about intercultural communication study and research, an overview about the definitions of culture and language and their relationship is stated, and then the author analyses one of the current sets of English textbooks in senior high school adopted in Jiangsu Province. Based on the analysis of the textbooks, some practical methods of inter-culture teaching are introduced, which include 1) Strengthening the introduction of Cultural Knowledge Information; 2) Valuing the Introduction and Practice of Cultural Communication Information; 3) Comparing and Contrasting Chinese and Western Cultures. The following part provides an investigation and an experiment on intercultural communicative awareness among senior high school students. The analysis of the investigation shows it is quite necessary to cultivate intercultural communicative awareness in high school students and the result of the pre-test also shows that the students are poor at intercultural knowledge. Then the result of the post-test shows that by applying culture teaching methods in English classes, the students have made much progress and a survey shows that most of the students enjoy the culture teaching methods. In the end, some suggestions for future study are given, in which the author hopes that this thesis can be of some help for English teaching in Senior High Schools.